Per PCMag, Zensys Z-Wave is Home Automation that Works. I’m going to order a kit and try it out – it can’t be any worse than x-10 – i generally don’t use x-10 at halloween time because the robustness and latency is just not up to snuff. But maybe this will be better.

A VC: Turning Commodity Into Scarcity – great insight – it is a core challenge for many businesses large or small – I remember back in the days when I worked in MSN, where the ad sales team worked hard to turn the huge inventory of unsold ad space into limited run special opportunities – “be one of our 5 Valentine’s Day partners”, “be one of our 3 premier blah-blah partners” – great work by that team to turn excess into scarcity. A great basic business lesson.

What a great story about the early days of Excite – Bnoopy: Persistence Pays, Part 2 – never say die. Joe’s blog is generally a great read so far.

I guess we can cancel the election – Mahalanobis – Bush is the winner. From Olivier

Candy Labs - AppRocket - Download – wow, very fast.

Acrobat Speedup – awesome!!! speeds up reader loading by a huge amount.

Karen’s Power Tools – a whole bunch of useful toys

Outlook Attachment Options – finer grained control over outlook’s attachment blocking

Broken URL fixer – easy fixup of those busted urls you get in mail

Good article on the historical origins of Ohio-Michigan rivalry – thanks Mike. (The link on the second page to the alternative lyrics to “Hail to the Victors” is busted, but you can find the words here (along with a huge number of other pejorative versions of fight songs))

Per LarryO, a lot of people are running XP in non-admin mode at MSFT. Some great pointers in his article – Aaron’s blog and his post on RunAs. I’ve had problems making non-admin work on the machine in our family room – mostly when I am at the machine and I want to do something not permitted – I have to dig into this RunAs post. Particularly as it applies to running CPLs and manipulating network connections.

Just finished this bio of Ludwig II. Probably mostly of interest to folks with my name and heritage (tho my ancestors left Germany long before the events of Ludwig II’s life), but it was pretty fascinating. His patronage of Wagner, of architecture, his erratic behaviour, the plot against him, his mysterious death – a lot of interesting threads. I’m more motivated to visit Bavaria now…

Zdnet article on intel’s latest investments including Pure Networks (I’m on the board).

From Fanblogs this week so far:

Conventional Wisdom – who’s up, who’s down.

Just 46 teams left in the single elimination college football championship tournament. Go Bucks!

Minnesota and Purdue are playing out of their minds…

The FanBlog XIV – the most considered poll in the nation.

Big 10 early grades…Kudos to Purdue, Shame on Iowa.

Andy starts a blog – A Sack of Seattle – and a company – Judy’s Book (I’m on the board).

Making time at the Holiday Spectacular! tech media event - Engadget - www.engadget.com

John Battelle’s Searchblog: Amazon Gives A9 Users a Discount - clever way to motivate use.

Firefox gets to 1 million downloads - are we really going to see browser competition again?

Wikipedia surpasses 1M article - fantastic, I’m embarrassed I haven’t contributed to any yet.

VMWare Ace - I’d use this at home for all the machines that the rest of the family uses…

Ad serving for games - what a great idea, look at how many minutes a month a user spends in front of a game…

Lies to protect the status quo.